Last week, crude oil started flowing through a newly expanded pipeline that stretches more than 600 miles from the tar sands of Canada’s Alberta province to an export terminal near Vancouver in British Columbia. The Canadian government spent $25 billion and more than four years to complete construction on the Trans Mountain Pipeline expansion which will triple its capacity to ship nearly a million barrels of oil a day. But the project has also raised concerns about the threat of oil spills south of the border, and the harm to endangered marine mammals from increasing tanker activity moving through the Salish Sea to customers in Asia. Longtime OPB Olympia correspondent Tom Banse joins us to share his recent reporting on this story.
This transcript was created by a computer and edited by a volunteer.
Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. Crude oil is now flowing through a newly expanded pipeline that stretches from Alberta’s tar sands to an export terminal near Vancouver. The Canadian government-owned Trans Mountain Pipeline expansion will bring almost a million barrels of oil a day to the West Coast. It will also mean a huge increase in tanker traffic. The project has raised concerns about the threat of oil spills and potential harm to endangered marine mammals. Tom Banse is a longtime Olympia correspondent for OPB who has not proven very successful at retiring, which is good news for us. He’s been reporting on this and he joins us now. Tom, welcome back.
Tom Banse: Hi, so glad to be with you.
Miller: I described this as an expansion of existing infrastructure. Can you just describe what this pipeline expansion entails?
Banse: It’s really interesting, this is an engineering marvel, Dave. But it has benefits and consequences, both for Canada, here in the US Northwest, and energy markets globally, really. In engineering terms, what happened here was the existing pipeline, from Edmonton to the Pacific Coast, was twinned, which means that there was a second parallel pipeline buried in the ground next to the original one. And then all the associated mechanics were upgraded – pump stations and compressors. So the bottom line is that this whole shebang can now carry just about triple the volume of oil to the West Coast than it did before. And that’s a lot of new oil coming our way.
Miller: And then the export capabilities at the port facility at Burnaby, near Vancouver, were also greatly expanded. What’s this going to add up to?
Banse: Yeah, and that’s where this matters the most to us south of the border, because it means a lot of that new oil flowing to the West Coast is going to be put on tankers and shipped overseas or down to California. Right now, most of that oil is staying here on the West Coast. There’s a spur off the original pipeline that goes to the oil refineries in Northwest Washington state, where the refined gasoline and diesel comes down in a different pipeline to Portland and goes out to most of Oregon.
But that existing pipeline is full, so this extra is gonna go on tankers, and right now, you have maybe four or five laden tankers per month going out to sea from the existing terminal. This new expanded terminal, with triple the loading capacity, could go up to 34 tankers per month. So that’s essentially from one per week to one per day.
Miller: Or more. You have, though, a sobering comparison. You note that this enormous increase means that British Columbia tanker traffic will now rise to become roughly on par with Washington’s level of traffic. It was helpful for me to read that, as somebody in the US. So where is this marine traffic actually going to be?
Banse: Well, we should be clear. There’s a fair amount of tanker traffic already on the Northwest coast and into the Salish Sea ... so, Puget Sound and the shared border waters with Canada. Some of that’s North Slope crude from Alaska coming to the refineries I just mentioned, that also are being supplied from Alberta.
But if this goes to the maximum output, this is like more than 300 additional tankers per year that are sailing out of Vancouver, Canada’s harbor, threading their way through the Canadian Gulf Islands and Washington’s San Juan Islands – that you hopefully have visited and vacationed – before it will take a turn at Victoria, British Columbia, to head out the Strait of Juan de Fuca, past the Olympic Peninsula – another vacation playground – and then either go across the ocean to Japan, China, Korea, as far as India, or south, past Washington and Oregon to California refineries, who are eager to have an additional source of crude oil.
Miller: There have obviously been some very high-profile tanker disasters over the years, Exxon Valdez [oil spill] comes to mind for me, and probably for many people. In Oregon, the New Carissa spilled 70,000 gallons of oil near Coos Bay in 1999.
Banse: The tanker! That was just the bunker fuel.
Miller: Oh! How common are these kinds of spills? I mean, if oil spills are one of the big concerns from the increase in tanker traffic, how much should folks worry?
Banse: Not a whole lot. I would say – and the modeling backs this up – that a major oil spill is a very low probability event, but it has catastrophic consequences if it does happen. I compare it a little bit to a Cascadia megaquake, also known as “The Big One,” which we’ve talked about on the show other times; also a very low probability event that may not happen in our lifetimes, but one that will be very glad we prepared for, if it does happen.
Miller: Well, what do the preparations look like? What has the operator, Trans Mountain Corporation, said about safety concerns, based on tanker transit?
Banse: Yeah, that was a big part of the permitting process for this pipeline expansion. And Trans Mountain proudly notes on their website and in interviews, that there has not been a single oil spill from one of its tanker operations since it began shipping oil back from the original pipeline opening in 1956. So, that’s a long time. There have been spills from the pipeline itself on land, but not in the water.
They are making really big investments with public money, Canadian public money, in upgrading the spill prevention and response capabilities. That includes buying lots of extra oil skimmers, response vessels, rescue tugboats, adding 24/7 staffing for vessel accidents, and adding marine shipping pilots. They’ll ride with the tankers longer than the practice now.
And thinking back to the Baltimore disaster, with a container ship hitting the bridge, you will remember that that’s on people’s minds right now … so the tugs had already disconnected from that big ship and couldn’t rescue it in time to keep it from hitting the bridge. In this case, these tankers coming from this pipeline expansion will be escorted all the way to the Pacific Ocean from Vancouver Harbor, and that is a considerable extra expense and a practice that we don’t do on the US side.
Miller: So those are some of the safeguards that the operators are putting in place. But how have environmental organizations responded?
Banse: They have tried to stop this from the beginning, especially on the Canadian side, as well as tribes in First Nations in Canada. Very worked up about this, from the risk, not only of oil spills, but also the just the increase in large, big noisy vessels passing through these waters. And the American tribes have fishing rights in these waters.
Then there’s the climate change angle that was, for Washington State governor Jay Inslee, who’s really cut his teeth on being a green governor, this is going in the completely wrong direction in his view, in terms of expanding fossil fuel infrastructure instead of moving toward clean energy. He said that the Washington State Attorney General, tribes, and environmental groups on both sides of the border all testified in opposition to this, but to no avail. And so now they’re like, we hope we are prepared.
Miller: What might this increase in marine traffic mean for marine life, including orcas?
Banse: That’s an iconic Northwest species that’s probably off the Oregon, Washington coast right now in the ocean, feeding on salmon that come into these waters, where these tankers will travel in the spring and summer and early fall. And it’s not only the oil spill risk, but another big consequence is underwater noise.
Endangered orcas, that are native to our Northwest waters, feed by kind of a natural variation of sonar, called echolocation. And if there’s big noisy tankers going by, they have a hard time finding their food. So that’s certainly a concern and disturbance, and there are other whales making a comeback in our Northwest waters, including humpbacks. So there’s also the concern of ships hitting whales, which does happen a few times every year already now. And in some cases, it’s fatal for the whales.
Miller: You mentioned a lot of Canadian public money [that’s] gone towards this. That wasn’t the way it started. But the Canadian government, if I understand correctly, basically stepped in, and now has ended up spending something like $25 billion on this – despite the fact that Justin Trudeau, like presidents Obama and Biden, has talked a lot about reducing climate change, reducing his country’s greenhouse gas emissions. How has the Canadian government justified this?
Banse: Yes, there’s a contradiction there, and you hit it spot on. Prime Minister Trudeau talks a good game about Canada being a climate leader. And there are some policies where they’re ahead of the United States in that regard. But what a lot of us south of the border may not realize, is that Canada is also a global oil power, and that’s largely due to the huge untapped oil reserves in Alberta that are landlocked, that this pipeline expansion will help unlock.
And the oil sector is a major industry in Canada that even the Prime Minister, with aspirations to be green, cannot ignore, and the pipeline expansion was crucial to that industry reaching its full potential. The Bank of Canada, this Spring, estimated that the opening of the pipeline that just happened this past week, through next year, will add one quarter of a point to the National GDP of Canada. That’s a big deal, and that’s why you have the Canadian taxpayers buying this pipeline from a private Houston-based company in 2018, when Kinder Morgan, the original proposers, was gonna throw in the towel because there was so much opposition, they weren’t sure they’re going to make it and the costs were going up. And I think, poor Canada, they bought the line for $4.5 billion – with a “B,” Canadian, and it’s ending up costing them, as you said, $25 billion US, $34 billion Canadian. So that’s an extraordinary cost overall.
Miller: Tom, thanks very much.
Banse: You’re welcome.
Miller: Tom Banse is a longtime Olympia correspondent for OPB.
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